Second, I stand with the Ukrainian people in spirit because that is all I can do. I’d much rather live in a Ukrainian “Nazi” regime ruled by Volodymyr Zelenskyy then the “peace maker” Vladimir Putin on any given day.

Third, I will not try to explain why this war exists, I’ll just say that Putin as clearly stated that Ukraine is part of the “Motherland”, I think that is enough explanation, there is more, much more to it but that is for the historians and economists to sort out and explain.

We are now in day 18 since this absurd stupidity begun, and I am probably as hangry as you are. There are some positives though, it is currently a conventional and misinformation war, not that the Ukrainian people care or should care about these things, they are getting slaughtered for no action of their own. To be honest, I thought we, humanity, were over this kind of action.

There has been various war and occupations of foreign territories by various countries in the last 30 years or so, notably Iraq and Afghanistan by the United States but none of these posed a very real existential crisis for humankind. No one is talking about it seriously, but the Ukrainian crisis poses a real threat of a nuclear holocaust, and this explains the NATO and European responses.

Admittedly, a no-fly zone over Ukraine would be helpful as it would seriously limit the Russian war apparatus, so would support in the form of boots on the ground. But what would have stopped this war before it began would have been acceptance of Ukraine in both NATO and the EU, so why was it not done? Would it not been in everyone’s benefits?

That is the question and to answer it is no easy task, we are all under the false impression that the invasion started at the end of February 2022, but it started 12 years earlier.

The invasion of Ukraine started in March 2014, the Russians declared war against Ukraine 8 years ago, every Ukrainian knows this as a given.

So why was no actions taken then? And why has both NATO and the EU been dragging its feet with the acceptance of Ukraine? Why would they not impose a no-fly zone and limit support to the borders of Ukraine?

Because, any of these actions would cause World War III and that poses very real existential crisis for humankind! That is why.

This is why a majority of the rest of the world has opted to sanction Russia, with sanctions that have serious ramifications. It also caused Vladimir Putin to declare that the sanctions are a declaration of war, that worries me.

So, both the EU and NATO have their hands tied and, in my opinion are doing right by humankind, and unfortunately the Ukrainian and to a degrees the Russian people are the losers. It is a tragedy of epic proportions, both the EU and NATO know that the threat of nuclear use by Russia is not posturing, it is very real. In case you did not know, Russia’s nuclear armada is considered to be the largest in the world.

This is MAD both in its insanity and in Mutually Assured Destruction.

This is why the EU and NATO are waiting to see how far Putin is willing to go, if he attacks an EU country, the NATO war machine will have no choice but to engage and WW3 will be a reality… Somehow, I don’t think we will escape it.

Think about it, a massive Russian force on one side of the border of the new Soviet Union and NATO forces on the other, all mere kilometers from one another, something will give.

I live with both an unseen and a near-invisible disability, one is pain and it is the major one, the one that stopped me from working and throw me into the life of a jobless disabled person. The other is less problematic, mostly because the human spirit and mind can adapt to a lot so I adapted to live with an extreme weakness to my right arm and near-complete loss of any coherent use of my right hand and anything past the forearm really.

Seldom do I complain and even less are the days when I had enough, but this has changed of late. I do not know if it is the perpetual grinding of pain or the stupidity of people or the over-eagerness of close ones to help, but I am sure of my current and more regular “I’ve had enough” state of being.

When I am in pain over a certain threshold I become very withdrawn but also very short-tempered, so I usually dive into one of two types of activities. The first is a mindless succession of instructions to achieve something, LEGO building is ideal though it does nothing for the pain, it relieves the brain’s attention to it. The other is overwhelming the brain to the extent that it can no longer give any attention to the pain, it usually takes me two simultaneous activities to achieve such a state, a state that oddly resembles meditation.

But this post is not about my pain mitigation techniques, though I should do one some times in the future.

Today’s post is aimed at these kind souls that think they are helping by relieving us of some shores, for example sorting my draws. It looks neater, but I can not find anything anymore.  Let’s not even mention, “let me help you to find what you are looking for”, even knowing the heart of that person is in the right place if I am battling both my pain and my complete lack of movement at that point, rage is all you are going to get.

Pain does that, irrational thought and rage, and possibly self petty for the fact that you used to be able to do this in your sleep.

It is often difficult to impossible to explain, there are moments in which I can rationalise everything down to, “I am not right in my mind right now, let it go” and there are moments where all I can muster is “I  am tired of this, I’ve had enough” with all the rage that comes with it.

Of late, the latter seems the order of the day, today is no different but I live in the hope that tomorrow will be better.

All of this to explain to the “unaffected” and “healthy” that sometimes, don’t try to understand us, we don’t either. When we are like that, stay out of our way and let it pass. And I am certain it is not easy to watch, you may be surprised to know that we, the affected, are bystanders too, when the pain takes over we may as well be someone else because I can assure you we are not in complete control of our actions.

For reference, this is my post:

Before I continue, I need to be very clear that every concept beyond this point is based on two principles. One, the current and all past social systems are stories we tell ourselves to maintain order and thus can be and often should be changed. Two, humanity’s survival and prosperity is more important than the individual. However, the individual has fundamental rights that are immutable and therefore can not be violated under any circumstances except one, but I will discuss that in later posts when I de describe a new justice system.

The future of humanity is a complex issue than can be divided into a few components:

• Social which includes race, ethnic group, sexuality and gender identity groups, religious groups and much more.
• Economic, the money and employment factors, the things that make the world turn since the dawn of time.
• Political, the relations between groups of people, and it is understood that an individual may be part of more than one group.
• Scientific, any empirical data leading to a conclusion or theories.
• Historical, what happened in the past. Though that can be blurred at times, as it has missing empirical data because history gets re-written regularly. History gets modified, more often than not, to suit the story that will benefit specific groups, but it is still worth its weight in knowledge.

Each of these components, and some I am sure I forget, are interlinked to such an extent that changing one has a ripple effect on all of them. Achieving a balance across all components is not something I can even dream of, nevermind achieve, but let us try to create a fair system.

Where should we begin forming a new way of doing things? By looking at the big picture and drilling down. There will always be cracks in any system, that is unavoidable. First, let us be honest, no modern socio-political system work as of today, Covid-19 is clearly showing us that our leaders and political system are unsuited to our future. Even worse, our current economy is completely unable to handle any large scale global catastrophe, whether it is a virus or climate change.

So where do we go from here?

In short, we need a new operating system and reboot, one that works on the premise that it can and must be adjusted regularly to suit the current global or regional situation but has a strong enough foundation to carry us through any catastrophes but lean enough to accommodate different groups.

We can no longer rely on the old systems; if Covid-19 is teaching us anything, it is that we need to be more humanitarian in our social systems and that we are a truly global species. Boundaries are no longer the limit of our problems. What happens in one country or region can have massive impacts in a little town lost in the middle of a desert on the other side of the planet or at a global scale.

Things that would help, I will discuss many of these in further posts, but we need to start somewhere with a list, this is mine.

• A single global governing entity for planetary concerns.
• Abolish all currencies in favour of a global currency, for argument sake’s I’ll call it the “Mondial” though the name is irrelevant.
• Institute a minimum guaranteed human rights in the form of minimum rights to food, shelter, education, health and more.
• Institute a new human rights system that is fully inclusive and takes care of the above but also the planet and various natural habitats and other species on our planet.
• A freedom charter that makes sense in a single global economy as well as protecting minorities.
• A global non-violence charter to avoid wars and incentivise global co-operation.
• A global climate charter to slow down and even reverse climate change.
• Disbanding nations as there are today in favour of smaller semi-independent regions that are socially and ethnically viable.
• The creation of a non-political global governing system.

Now I am not saying that everything here is doable in the coming decades or that these are the only solutions, but we need to start somewhere let us start with this list which may change, grow or shrink.

A single global governing entity

I can already hear the pitchforks and screams of the populace! How about you read further before you judge?

What do I mean by a global governing entity? Firstly, it has to be neutral and would have limited powers. These powers would be related to anything that would affect humankind or earth. Oh and not anything like the United Nations, a toothless organisation crippled by politics.

Any issues that relate to climate change, natural habitats, a virus outbreak, a regional discord, distribution of essential goods or a meteorite aimed at earth, would be covered under the global governing entity. There are probably more instances where it could intervene, but you get the just of it.

This governing body as all future governing bodies except for what I call the social leadership, which I will discuss in a separate post, would be made of a combination of technocrats, practising scientists and central artificial intelligence.  And here comes the pitchforks again!!!

The AI would do all the coordination and recommend distribution of goods and skills globally. The technocrats would, in turn, review this and add their inputs and finally the science community would add their vote. This would be on a case by case basis, and this triumvirate would hopefully avoid a global dictatorship. Though the AI would be involved in every aspect of the governing this would not be the case for the human part, these would be expert workgroups that are created for the purpose of resolving and issue and dissolved as soon a consensus is achieved. The consensus is a majority vote by the ai and its workgroup, that would mean the workgroup might override the AI’s recommendations in favour of a different solution or agree with the AI. The AI would also eliminate the bureaucracy, this would allow for a global vote on an issue being posed to the entire population with the majority vote at over 50%, though I think a majority vote at a global level would need to be higher than 50.x %.

The AI would have subordinate specialised AIs of its own, these being regional, sub-regional, state and provincial but also covering social groups. Its directive is administrative, not decision making, again special interest groups of experts would be created and disbanded as the need arises.

This system would easily allow for regional states to have specific laws that apply to their needs. These could be vetted by special interest groups of experts. Now, there is the question of how those experts are chosen, I have a vague idea but more on that later.

An important power that the single global governing entity would have is the ability to enforce resolutions, how it would do that is a bit of a mystery to me at this time, as I said I have ideas but certainly not all the answers. So here is a plot hole that needs to be plugged.

A system as proposed here would also void the need for various currencies as these would become useless and the driving force would shift to something different.

But that is is for another post and for me, a couple of sleepless nights as I develop these ideas.

When I landed, humans had already set foot on the moon, mastered the atom and the world was a mess.

18 282 days later, humans have decoded their own genome, increased their Global average lifespan by 8 years and humanity is looking at colonizing another planet, Mars.
Oh, let me not forget that the world is still a mess.

Obviously, I am missing a lot of other great event from the fall of the Berlin Wall to Nelson Mandela becoming president. But what marked me most since I landed 50 years ago, is the constant improvement in the information technologies space. I am not impartial about it since I am and always will be a technologist but humanity has made technological breakthroughs that would be hard and maybe even impossible to imagine when I landed.

Think about it, in our pockets we carry computers more powerful than those used to go to the moon! And not by a small fraction but by numerous multiples.

We are able to communicate with anyone in the world with a few taps of a screen, share memories and thoughts instantly and even seamlessly cooperate on projects from one side of the planet to the other.

But we also lost a part of our humanity and good judgment as we get manipulated by big media and we have become slaves of consumerism and I am no exception. Our leadership is so disconnected from those they supposedly serve that I can’t call it leadership any more, it is more like dictatorship. Our world, our planet, our spaceship is being irreparably damaged for the foreseeable future and fixing it is barely on the agenda when at all.

People are destroying all remanence of history that should never repeated but mostly never forgotten, all the while being killed by invisible and relentless enemies from COVID-19 to obesity and many more.

Humans have become their own worst enemy, and even bordering on suicidal.

But there is hope!

Even though we live in dark times and the future looks bleak, I think humanity will find its way. Most of the writing I do on this blog is about finding a way to balance humanity’s thirst and saving starship earth. It is about hope and to you the reader, I hope it makes you think and triggers a spark in you that will drive you to improve the state of humanity or just impact, even if it is a small dent, your social circle. Remember that a lot of small dents can create a masterpiece!

I don’t have all the answers and if any and I am but a dreamer, so I will attempt to give a few as misguided as you may think they are, they are meant to make you think and create a conversation. Hopefully, conversations that will lead to better solutions.

Surprisingly, I am looking forward to the next 50 years, even though I am carrying the heavy burden of a painful and relentless disability, CRPS. I really want to see the next 50 years, I am exited about the prospect of what is to come. I think incredible and positive changes are a foot. I think we are at the dawn of a new epoch for humanity and starship earth.

So here is a cheer to the next 438 792 hours or 18 282 days or 50 years!

And don’t forget to support your local animal shelter, if there are owls, elephants or huskies all the better.

In this post, I will be discussing the short and medium terms of work and employment with what I would like to see and the unfortunate carnage that is coming. I will address how we can mitigate the human looses and how we could create a new and, I think, viable economic and social systems in later posts.

As of this post, we are entering a new, and for now, fictitious future. But should you have questions or should you want to constructively engage with me on a concept you believe could be improved or even be changed completely, I encourage you to use the comments system below.

The immediate concern worldwide is the economy and getting it started again, this has been everywhere in the media and political spheres, but how do you go about restarting an economy?

The answer is you don’t!

If you think this is controversial, wait, there is plenty more coming throughout this journey into the unknown.

The economics of tomorrow will be vastly different from the economics of yesterday, there will be an attempt at falling back onto known and probably antiquated systems, but the blunders of COVID-19 will cause much damage to the governmental institutions. The aftermath in the economic sector will cause many countries population to revolt as they are sidelined or fall into hunger. This will lead to new governments and a dramatic change in politics, as those that profited from the situation will be held accountable by the people they were supposed to serve. Riots and protests will be the order of the day, it will eventually topple the current system, and I am hoping that it will bring humanity to a new dawn, one of peace and prosperity.

Now onto the bright and tragic future of work and employment.

Many of the advances that were made in the past few decades in automation, robotics and artificial intelligence, these will be fast-tracked and further development in all spheres of automation will be made making our reliance on technology even more significant than today.

This technological evolution sometimes referred to as the 4th industrial revolution, will create a new class of unemployed people but not because they do not want to work but because they will become redundant as their profession disappears. This is one of the realities that none of us can escape, and though new occupations will be created, most manual labour based jobs will be replaced by automation over the next few decades. The only manual trades that will be left will be any in the craftsmanship and arts, both of which are essential to humanities evolution.

As for the immediate consequences of the near-global lockdown? Many people are going to lose their jobs across all professions and all walks of life, save a few in the medical and other essential jobs. This will translate into a massive job loss globally, and no country is immune from this. I  believe that this economic catastrophe will be the catalyst for a new socio-economic system which will no longer be based on money but on a social and humanitarian basis, I will discuss that system in great details in the coming months.

Needless to say that if the socio-economic system changes so will the political system. I believe that politicians, as they are today, will vanish very soon and be replaced something that removes the biases of the current system but I am getting ahead of myself, this will be coming in future posts.

Back to the near future, those that can and have worked from home will continue to do so, the genie is out the box, and both employees and employers will see the benefits very soon. Those benefits are from spare time due to a lack of travel to general stress levels of employees are lowered. This will also have an economic benefit, as employees will no longer need to pay for transport, and employers will no longer need to pay for large offices and all that entails. This trend was pre-existing and will be fast-tracked. This makes a part of what I call the circular domino effect; I will explain how that works later if you read my previous post you may start to see the picture forming on how everything is interlinked.

If you think this will not happen in the next few years, think of what happened in the early twentieth century as we transitioned from horse and carriages to automobiles, it was not smooth. Still, it happened relatively quickly, about 20 years by some conservative reports. We are well into the first ten years of the “working from home” trend.

Returning to the subject at hand, the working from home policies will change the way that we build and buy homes to accommodate these new standards and large office buildings will be recycled and become residential buildings. The homes of tomorrow will also have a built-in office with stable high-speed internet connectivity for remote work and online meetings.

I can also see that companies mostly comprising of white-collar workers will have only have boardrooms, and hotdesks for essential face to face meetings. These companies will no longer buy computers or laptops for their employees but rather give a subsidy to their employees to purchase what they need as some companies have started doing. Software as a service such as Microsoft 365 (formally Microsoft Office 365) will become the standard, companies will pay for this service and the licence for the employee, as you move from company to company through your career, you will move from licence to licence of the software as a service.

There will be an unexpected benefit to having a part of the workforce working from home, carbon dioxide and various other greenhouse gases emissions will be dramatically reduced.

Now think of the ease of switching to electric self-driving vehicles that act like taxis as opposed to the current monolith of the public transport system and personal cars. I doubt the later will disappear anytime soon but I can see a pickup and drop car system evolving rapidly, it has been trialled in various cities around the world by well-known companies, there are even companies based on it like Car2Go. The difference here would be that these will be an integral part of the public transport system and considered a global public service that is free for everyone to enjoy, but that is for another post and another day.

Furthermore, I do not think our governments or enterprises will make things happen; I think we are at an intersection in humanity’s advancement, where average Joe will be dictating the social changes. Our so-called leadership is far too disconnected from the grassroots to be able even to imagine some of the changes that I will be discussing in this series of posts. But I digress.

Let me begin with: “Let’s get real; things will never be the same, and that is good.”

A new normal is coming, it will be hard in the beginning, but we will come out of it better and stronger as unified humanity. You will notice I did not say “a unified society” because it would be near impossible. Besides, diversity is the cornerstone of any social evolution without it we would all be clones thinking the same way, content with our inevitable doom. We will come out of this changed for the better, the grassroots will be empowered, and the leadership system changed. The economics of the future will no longer relly on perceived monetary value but rather on the individual’s usefulness in their social environment and humanity as a whole; we already see this happen as this crisis evolves.

This crisis has brought a major realisation to the fore. There are those who are keeping humanity alive and moving forward. Yet others are there for our amusement, and not essential, except maybe for our moral wellbeing. Finally, there are the useless, easily replaced by artificial intelligence – a fair and more efficient contribution.

I will be writing about all of this and more, a currency-less world where skill and usefulness to society and humanity are rewarded, and crime punished very differently than in today’s system where the perpetrator has as many rights as the victim. If this sounds a little Gene Roddenberryeske, it kind of is. I will admit that he has been a large influence on my vision along with Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, Jule Verne, Arthur C. Clarke and many more visionaries and scientists.

I’d like to make a note about the present; our immediate concern must be the well being of those great many that were employed and active in our economies like those in industries that are collapsing in the short term, tourism is a good example. The good news is that there will be new industries that will rise, facemask manufacturing and, from current trends, facemask fashion. These are relatively easy to guess, as we can already see the evidence of this today.

But there is far more to it than meets the eye, we are living in a domino effect of staggering proportions, and none of the outcomes has even begun to show themselves, everything is speculation, including these writings.

Before I begin with my forecast of a better future for humanity, there is a premise that we need to remember, it is that social rules are made up of human constructs created by people’s imagination. And though a necessity for a stable society to function, these social laws are made by people and thus can be adapted to suit the current situation of humanity at any given time. In other words, our laws and social rules are not made of stone; they are malleable and need to remain that way for humanity to evolve.

Immediate social changes

There are many social changes that we have begun to make, all of them with lasting effects. I thought I’d start pointing out some today and discussing them in more details in future posts.

I will begin our journey into the unknown as you step out of your home and later come back to it, this will be the easiest to give you a glimpse of the domino effect we are living through, and it’s vast lasting impacts on our society. I will be making some assumption such as the viral threat is here to stay for the medium term, and there may be another virus threat coming at the same rate than last century or the current one will mutate sufficiently to still be a threat within the same period.

The most apparent social change is social distancing and the impacts it will have in our lives but also our current infrastructures and businesses.

Public transport is going to change dramatically, be it cruise ships, plane, trains or buses. There will be a substantial reduction in people movement. As a result, the public transport system will have to adapt to both the reduction of travellers and the risk control measures for the long term. Additionally, fewer people are going to travel to work as work from home policies will become commonplace; this will be discussed in later posts.

These changes will mean a fundamental change in the way humans travel; travelling will become something that requires necessity and no longer let’s just go to the mall or restaurant for entertainment. Because of this, retailers are going to adjust the way they trade, e-commerce will be the standard and brick, and mortar sizes will be reduced and replaced by delivery infrastructures, the warehousing market is about to boom.

Speaking of warehousing and deliveries, as human contact is reduced for fear of infection, these will be automated, causing a substantial reduction of employees thus less need for human transport.

Tourism in faraway lands will be reduced to a minimum for various reasons, from people not wanting to expose themselves in buses and aeroplanes to unpractical quarantines on arrival as the UK has already imposed.

Restaurants, cinemas, nightclubs, casinos and similar venues will also be affected as people will start avoiding crowds, they will need to adapt. I foresee that a lot of restaurants will change to online ordering and delivery. Cinemas and nightclubs will become exclusive or extinct, and online streaming will become the standard. As for casinos? They will move their operations, as many already have, online. These, to name a few significant changes, are coming to our society in the short term.

Education will also become different, homeschooling with online assistance will become commonplace, forcing telecommunication enterprises to roll out high-speed, stable and affordable internet to everyone. Technologies such as fibre and 5G are going to become cornerstones of our society and probably a human right rather than a commodity.

Familial clusters and small village life are going to start reemerging as smaller communities will be less vulnerable to health hazards, again impacting on other facets of our social and economic state of affairs.

Any activities not requiring a human presence in a location will be replaced by remote work. Only the professions that will be left “going to work” are those that require the human presence and cannot be done remotely or that can’t be replaced by a robotic workforce directed by artificial intelligence.

This is the tip of the iceberg, and if you think it sounds like a lot of jobs will become redundant as automation and artificial intelligence will be able to fill these jobs that require human capital today, you would be correct in your assumption. This trend is not new; it started with the industrial revolution in the late 1800s.

You may ask two questions at this point, one: you categorically state this was an optimistic view of the future? And how are these people going to survive in this future, will famine and poverty not be the order of the day?
And I’ll answer yes to both questions, and I promise to discuss all of this and that it is optimistic.

Unfortunately, things will need to get worse before they get better, this is the only way humanity will revolutionise its current social, economic and political systems.

But I am not writing about the virus in this series, but rather what I think will follow whether or not we find a cure or a vaccine. Do not look for a conspiracy here, you will not find any, but in case you do…

First and foremost, anyone saying that this virus is human-made is either extraordinarily arrogant or a lunatic. Humanity is not that advanced or that intelligent, but here is a surprise, nature is. Covid-19 is so elegant and efficient at not being a systematic killer but rather a culling machine methodically thinning the heard. You have to admit that nature is relentless at finding new ways to balance itself.

This is not humanities first dance with mother nature’s creations either, here are some of the deadliest:

• 6^th century – The Bubonic Plague (Plague of Justinian) is estimated to have a death toll of 25 million in a world where there were but just 200 million humans.
• 14^th century – The Bubonic Plague (Black Death) is estimated to have a death toll between 75 and 200 million in a world with a population of about 450 million.
• 20^th century (1918-1920) – Influenza (Spanish Flu) with an estimated death toll between 20 and 50 million
• 20^th century (1956-1958) – Influenza (The Asian Flu) with an estimated death toll of 2 million.
• 20^th century (1968) – Influenza (The Hon Kong Flu) killed over 1 million people which included 15% of the Hong Kong population at the time.
• 20^th century (2009-2010) – Influenza (The Swine Flu) with a death toll of between 151 000 and 575 000 according to the USA’s CDC, thankfully eradicated.
• 20^th century (1981 to today) – HIV/AIDS with an estimated death toll rising well above 36 million and far from eradicated.

 
Interesting fact, did you know that the Spanish Conquistadors won the war for the Americas with a few pandemics? It was the largest biological war ever fought and also known as the American Plagues, the Incas were basically wiped off the planet in the 16^th century as they had no immunity against most common European diseases.

Just to mention a few of the notorious ones, now tell me again how some laboratory created this virus? Did they create Smallpox, Influenzas and Bubonic Plague too?

The human race also forgets a significant factor regarding this and any other pandemics; we are Homo Sapien and to borrow from Yuval Noah Harari’s must-read book, not Homo Deus (Gods), a mammal and part of the animal kingdom and thus not immune to disease.

I could add to these statements, but if you are still reading this post, you are open-minded enough to read the rest of my series on the future of humanity as I see it.

To close off, I would also like to say that I sympathise with all of the victims, victim’s families, friends and co-workers.
I also admire the selfishness and dedication of the people on the front line, I  am not going to list them, I think we all know who they are by now.

From here, I will be separating myself from humanity as it is the only way to stay objective and project the possibilities that will confront us in the weeks, months and years to come.

A year or so after that, it became a permanent situation. I am one of the lucky ones, I was relatively well insured for this eventuality, so if little else, my finances were not going to be an issue.

Any doctors and other medical practitioners will bring a very important matter to your attention, how are you going to fill all your time?

Given that I get tired rapidly, I decided to start things that are not time-sensitive.

PhilGuides Southern Africa

My first project was related to tourism in South Africa. I thought that since I was going to be busy I should extend that to others too.

I started to create a framework for a website where a potential tourist could purchase a pre-made self-guided tour and go to his or her favourite travel agency and book the hotels, restaurants and visits along the proposed tour. This was going to be a relatively cheap service, that would also include an encyclopedia for South African tour guides. Unfortunately, my condition did not allow for a fixed timeline and the people I enlisted to help got fed up. I understand why.

Edit: The site was retired in April 2020 but the content is still available under the travel category on this site.

LEGO

Somehow, during the time I was developing the ideas behind PhilGuides, I started getting into the AFOL (Adult Fan of LEGO) scene on Facebook.

I built many sets since my diagnosis, it helped to train my left hand and improve dexterity, these were mostly Technic sets. At a point, I did it because I enjoyed it and it gave me a sense of satisfaction to complete a build, but I had completed the majority of Technics set available at the time. It was time to move to something else, Creator Expert Modular Building sets was where I would end up.

Again, there is a limited set of currently available buildings and it was getting expensive, I had to find an alternative. It is about then that I found out about Bricklink Studio, this is a computer-aided design software and renderer for use with LEGO. I started building in the virtual world of Stud.io, it was not long before I began to do my own designs.

I still design in Stu.io and build in the real world, my LEGO collection is still growing, albeit far slower. You can find my designs on my AFOL site Pascal’s Bricks and on social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube).

Helping friends

A great way to keep busing is by helping friends, and that has some unexpected benefits. I ended up being very isolated in my house, yes our helper and my mother, who lives with my wife and me, are around but I found longing for more. Helping friends allows for that more part and gives a sense of purpose to boot.

My not so secret project

Over the years many friends have insisted me to write, I wrote a lot of blog posts about a great many subjects from the ludicrous insights of “How the microwave oven fuels instant gratification in society”  to the useful travel tip of “What camera should you use when travelling”. But I recently started to write a book, it is a futurism novel that has its roots well grounded in today’s reality, it is a long term goal and I am still in the early stages but it also keeps me busy.

In short, find things you are interested in putting your spare energy into and get started. It will do you good and if it’s not your thing, find something else. Find something that you enjoy doing but that has a sense of fulfilment too.

Pain is one thing but pain and depression, that is a recipe for a disaster, keeping busy and satisfied will keep the depression away.

And remember, never give up, never surrender.

A happy new year and let get this decade started on a good note.

I often describe my condition as having a cramp in the foot while driving because a lot of people know that feeling, the difference with my cramp is that it never goes away, it just varies in intensity. Though not very accurate in term of the type of pain, it is very close to the reality of a chronic pain sufferer in every other way.

What does it feel like?

For those of you with partners, family or friend who are chronic pain sufferers there are a few ways you can experience what we live through all the time, though I would not recommend anyone to try any of these. Why would anyone inflict pain on themselves? But if anyone wants to experience our pain in a safe, controlled way, try either of these techniques.

1. Fill a bucket with ice add water and plunge your arm or foot in it, leave your limb in it until you can’t handle it then leave it in for another 5 minutes.
2. Take a laundry peg, put it on your pinky, leave it there until it is unbearable, leave it there for another 5 minutes.

I won’t hold it against you if you can’t handle the extra 5 minutes and any chronic pain sufferer will understand. Those 5 minutes of torture, those 5 minutes where you could do nothing but think “I need this to stop”, we live through every day, all day long.

Some of us even lose the ability to use a limb or worse, but most of us lose the ability to think straight. Imagine those of us that go to work in this state every day, or those of us taking care of their kids.

Now that you know that we often feel helpless when facing our pain, imagine the energy it takes to face the pain all day long.

Loss of energy

I’ve made no secret that I suffer from CRPS, that is the only chronic pain I know and can describe with any accuracy. I imagine that a great many chronic pain suffers will describe the effects on themselves similarly.

The first and worst effect that comes to mind is probably the lack of energy I have. Though this is not so much a lack as it is a rapid consumption of energy. Let me explain.
Imagine you are a car, every night you get filled up, and you consume your fuel during the day, on most days you have enough to finish your day. On some days, if you are sick, for example, or if it was a particularly tiring day,  you get tired faster.

For a chronic pain sufferer, the situation is the same with an extra twist. Though we fill up every day with as much fuel as anyone else, our fuel is also used to pull a few overloaded trailers uphill in the rain. Pain is like that, being overloaded all the time and going uphill in the rain with no traction control. It is so bad that I often feel like I slipped back to the bottom of the hill.

The ripple effect on your emotional quotient

The simplest way to describe it is, I get tired faster because all my energy is spent at not screaming out in agony or snapping at everything.

Sometimes my energy is gone by 10:00 in the morning sometimes by 10:00 in the evening, but mostly by about 14:00 when I do not push myself and just idle the day away. Any negative emotions can become a serious problem, this is because it takes a lot of energy to maintain a semblance of normality. In other words, my emotional quotient (EQ) fluctuates radically during the day, to the point where some believe that I am mentally sick. It is nothing like that, it is just a lack of mental and physical energy.

The physical impacts

Having a pain that never let’s go creates other issues, I think that the most visible one must be the unwillingness to move. It seems to me that it is natural that we try our best to avoid pain, but how do you avoid pain when it is there all the time?

I started moving less, to the point I gained some weight. Finding the sweet spot where the is a balance of comfort versus pain is all that mattered. I am over that part of the pain cycle, mostly because no comfort brings balance anymore.

The social impacts

Because I was more irritable and susceptible to energy drains, I tend to select what I do and whom I see. I very rarely cancel any commitment but I often declined. I am lucky that a great many of my friends and all of my family understand my predicament.

The truth is that I avoid any major social gatherings, I avoid anything that could cause me to be drained or be physically hurt in any ways. My right arm is both not susceptible to pain and hypersensitive to it at the same time, I’ll probably explain how that is possible in a later post.

I think that most sufferers will nod at reading this, unaffected people will probably dismiss it as attention or petty seeking exercise.

Let me tell you, the unaffected, a secret, I don’t even want your help, most of us don’t. We don’t want your petty, or misplaced attention.

So, what do we want?

The pain to end! It is that simple.

But in the final analysis, we never give up and we never surrender!

Sometimes during early March 2017, I was at work and battled to concentrate on my tasks, and the office was too noisy to dictate, so I decided it would be a good idea to loan an isolated office to get my work done. Little did I know that this was to be my last day at work.

Me recounting that day is difficult, not because of what transpired but rather that it is all foggy at best and nonexistent at worst. I clearly remember getting to work and repossessing an office to go dictate in, after that things are a little more opaque. I can tell you that I had a sharp pain from my ring and little finger to my elbow, I remember that much.

From there, I have no idea how much time passed before I found myself scouring on the floor, at some point, I must have passed out, but I can’t be sure. I remember trying to call for help, but I can’t remember hearing my voice. I know I eventually phoned for help, my manager and my general manager, neither responded. Finally, I called my wife, all I could utter was “help, come to fetch me”, and again things became fuzzy.

What happened between that moment and my general manager finding me on the floor is a mystery to me. All I remember is my wife and mother arriving to pick me up and bring my car home. I ended up in the hospital again.

In the hospital, things got complicated; I was immediately directed to the emergency rooms, my neurologist was called. The emergency room doctors sent me for tests; these were an ultrasound of my shoulder, a few x-rays, and an MRI. Nothing indicated anything wrong, except the fact that I could not string a sentence together to save my life. My arm had gone a shade of bluish-grey pink, and my hand was severely swollen. My neurologist admitted defeat that day; he said that beyond the pain killers, there was little he could do.

If it was not for the valiant effort of my family and my occupational therapist, I can’t tell you what would have happened to me back then.

On that same day, I was declared unfit for duty, as it would turn out this is still the case today. I was also forbidden to drive and, though I never got told, I highly suspect there was an order for my neurologist to keep a close eye on me.

And so I began a journey where I was always in pain, 24 hours a day, 365 days a week but more on that in future posts. This is not a story of despair, nor is it a story of hope. This is a story of perseverance and tenacity, one which I hope will help others in my predicament and one that will help those that face our pain with us daily, our families, friends and co-workers.

Never give up, never surrender, these are not just words for me; this is my mantra, my way of life. As you read this blog, you will see these words often, they with my support group have probably saved my life.